Hard Hero Statues

After an almost 20 year absence of new licensed ThunderCats product, at long last ThunderCats were loose once again. Not the toys, not a new set of comic books, not a movie nor a new cartoon. But for the first time ever the property had been released in statue form. Revealed at Comic Con 2009, the Lord of the ThunderCats made his striking debut.

Taking a classic pose from the cartoon intro sequence and keeping true to the Rankin Bass design of the mighty Lion-O.

Hard Hero, the company that produced the statues received the rights to create the line on their third pitch to Warner Brothers. Others had tried and failed, but eventually fans got the chance to add these impressive collectibles to their shelf.

The team putting the statues together had worked on other impressive lines such as Conan, Marvel Super Heroes and Transformers. The sculptor working on the ThunderCats series was Paul Bennett who had produced work for the Warclans and Conan lines for Hard Hero.

Hard Hero had the ThunderCats line on license for a limited time and it wasn’t long before other companies began releasing collectibles as well. Four great quality statues were produced and sold before the line was cancelled. A mummified Mumm-Ra had been approved and was about to sent to the factory in Asia for production before the line was cancelled. On February 9th, 2012 Hard Hero notified buyers that they were closing up shop and they refunded pre-orders on the Mumm-Ra statue.

ThunderCatsLair.org is pleased to bring the most detailed information on the web about this terrific line. We’d like to thank Rob Potts for his active engagement with the fan community during the production run of the line. We’d also like to thank Paul Bennett, the sculptor who developed the line, for his loving attention to detail in bringing these characters to resiny life in three dimensions. Paul also provided us with a number of images of each piece in production as well as glimpses of what could have been, with his prelimary sculpts of Panthro and S-S-Slithe.